Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

WORLD-VIEW

form a cognitive set, their meanings became different. Hence, opinions expressed would differ, as would expectations and evaluations of behaviour—definitions of behaviour per se and the people and events it was deemed relevant to consider. Inasmuch as each individual possessed a number of verbal loops, then, the ‘same’ individual would also possess a number of different world-views; from one close informant Rapport discovered nine world-views, and from another, seven. It was as if his informants were habitually living and talking in a number of different, bounded, socio-cultural environments at one and the same time, and were different people in each. Moreover, the set of worlds in which one individual lived was not necessarily the same or even consistent with that of others.

Furthermore, linking together in this way the sets of preferred phrasal associations of different individual speakers, the snippets of world-views that speakers would reveal in different utterances, Rapport felt was more a process of recontextualizing than decontextualizing people’s words. It was as though he were returning the words from the momentary interactions in which he had heard the words expressed to the larger worlds of opinion, the cognitive homes, from which individual speakers had initially extracted their words for the mundane and rushed business of everyday conversation. To the extent that speakers partook of a common behavioural contract to meet, talk and work together, this was more a matter of partial overlaps, of individuals’ construing the ‘same’ events rather differently (fulfilling ‘different’ contracts) than their being organized into one common, socio-cultural context. It was beneath the surface of ambiguous conversational exchanges, in their series of diverse world-views, in which speakers lived more fully (intellectually and emotionally).

Inasmuch as world-views gave onto context, then, the latter should be understood as something internal: something originating in individual cognition rather than immanent in, or emanating from, an interactional setting. Context was something prior to interaction, something which individuals brought to it and employed within it. Context was the way individual speakers internalized words and related them to others in their heads so as to accrue meaning. Hence, the same cognitive context could reappear in any number of externally different situations, and vice versa, the same interactional setting being cognitively contextualized in any number of different ways.This was not to say that there could be no regularity or consistency between cognitive definition and external setting, that an individual did not possess a number of routine ways of behaving when talking in a particular setting, but that the decision was an individual and possibly private one.

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In short, it was within individual world-views that the significance of socio-cultural exchanges lay; it was their diverse world-views which individuals used in constructing, populating and anticipating the social worlds around them, and these furnished them with their expectations before meeting with other people in interaction, their opinions during such meetings, and their conclusions afterwards.

Representation and analysis

A conclusion to be drawn from focusing upon world-views as contexts of individual significance in socio-cultural milieux is that the anthropologist is not able to give just one neat and consistent account of socio-cultural interaction or exchange. Not only do individual worldviews fail to gave onto a set of common-denominational, communitywide perspectives, but this individual diversity refuses to be tied to objectively defined situations. The logic behind these cognitive contexts is subjective and particular.

The analytical value of focusing on world-views would seem to depend on refusing to corrupt this logic: refusing to impose a spurious unity upon informants, singly or collectively, in the name of clarity or generalization. The aspiration must be to an understanding of internal judgements and definitions, so that the integrity of world-views is maintained over and above dubious leap of abstraction to socio-cultural (or psychical) wholes. In spite of the chaotic aggregations which may result, it is a diversity of individual orderings of particular landmarks in idiosyncratic landscapes that the analyst determines to convey. The commonalities of exchange—the sharing of abstract codes, of a grammar of interaction, and of regular occasions on which it is exchanged—can then be recast as moments in which a diversity of individual meanings and motivations find expression, realization and fulfilment. It is through the working-out of these individual world-views that the fate and development of the contractual commonalities lie.

See also: Cognition, Individuality, Interaction, Situation and

Context

WRITING

Raymond Williams once commented on the way in which the process of writing has become social-scientifically ‘naturalized’ in the Western academy (1983c:1). We ask ‘what is the writing about?’, ‘what

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knowledge, facts and experience does it contain?’, but we treat the process itself as non-problematic: as transparent and commonsensical, once the skills of writing have been acquired in childhood.

Writing and literacy

Anthropologists, perhaps, have been less prone than others to this lapse, since they more often treat those who do not and may not seek to acquire the writing technique to which Williams refers. Hence, treating writing as a marker of literacy, anthropology has emphasized the historico-cultural specificity of such writing, and the effects which its arrival precipitates. Anthropology has postulated, inter alia, that the technique of writing represents an objectification of speech and a proliferation of words and meanings which causes more layering and less indexicality in socio-cultural milieux, so that individual members become palimpsests who participate less fully and more sceptically, less securely and more selectively, in their traditions (Goody and Watt 1968:57–8); writing affords that socio-cultural alienation and distance out of which a sense of greater unities comes, and an evolution in consciousness, science and technology in terms of encyclopaedic composition and sequentiality (Ong 1977:47). Here is a technique for the fixing of discourse, preserving it as a possible archive of later analysis and translation, and the creating of a quasi-separate world of texts which comes to eclipse the circumstantial world of orality (Ricoeur 1981:145– 9); writing is a means of keeping present moments at bay and at the same time preserving them, recontextualizing them, as ongoing, univocal, unifocal and reconsultable (Clifford 1990:57–64). Or again, here is a technology which lends itself to the social institutions of its time and place so as to serve a number of possible functions (hierarchical, educational), and thus to structure a particular ideological reality for those who employ (rather, are employed by) it (Street 1984:8; and cf. Herzfeld 1993:116). In short, in anthropology, writing comes to be conceived of not so much as a neutral medium of knowledge, facts and experience, a window onto an independent reality, than as a way of knowing in itself.

Writing as a mode of cognition

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which writing has still become ‘naturalized’ in this anthropological appreciation. For, writing has been treated wholly as a particular technique or technology: writing as the inscription of words or forms on a page or material surface. However,

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writing could profitably be regarded as something far broader: the orderly inscription of words or forms per se, whatever the precise technique and technology of that inscription. Hence: words in phrases and sentences, but also musical notes in chords and phrases, daubs of paint in shapes and relations, religious icons in mouldings and arrays, physical behaviours in habits and routines, prescribed roles in institutions and hierarchies. Inscription, moreover, might take place on any number of surfaces: fields, houses, footballs, spaces, bodies and memories, as well as pages. Here is writing understood as ‘the orderly use of symbolic forms (that is, forms which carry meaning for their user) for the making of orderly worlds’; writing conceived of not as a technique of communication but as ‘a mode of cognition which makes experience meaningful’.

To elaborate, briefly, writing entails the separating of experience from its ratiocination (Stock 1983:531). Writing is an experiencing of experience, a meta-experience; it is the considered ordering of experience in symbolic form, and the conscious production of meaning from it. Understood in its fullest form, writing is the practice of symbolically reflecting on, and making sense of, experience.

Furthermore, since symbols are simply ‘vehicles for a conception’ (Geertz 1973), the outward manifestations of such writing may be highly diverse. Diaries and novels, of course, monographs and theses, poems, songs and plays; but also the shapes of field-systems and the patterns of their ploughing; also ways of shaping, carrying, tattooing and clothing bodies; also forms of dancing and politicking, orating and marketing and warring. All these may serve as mnemonics by which messages about life’s order and meaning may be inscribed, retained and recalled. A definition of writing in this conceptualization would be, then: the composition, in symbolic form, of a sequence of thoughts and ideas and senses such that a set of meanings is created and retained from passing experience for further possible retrieval, amendment and elaboration. The practice of written reflection remains a constant even as the forms of its expression vary.

Writing as universal

Writing, in this way, can be appreciated as a universal: a ubiquitous and constant part of human being. It is the special preserve neither of certain cultures and times (literate versus non-literate), nor of certain social classes and occupations (professionals versus workers); it is practicable and practised by all (cf. Berger 1979:6).

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Certainly, both in socio-cultural milieux which practise largely oral techniques of communication and those which prefer scriptural ones, there will flourish the practice of scrutinizing and abstracting from experience so as to produce orderly accounts. Orality and literacy do not necessarily entail different habits of thought. As Shweder comments (1991a:14), if we use the word ‘civilized’ to describe those people who can explain their practices far better and with more imagination than the anthropologist, then the ‘primitive’ who leads an unexamined life does not exist. ‘There is no “primitive”’, Rabinow concurs (1977:151–2), ‘[t]here are other men living other lives.’

Writing, text and self

Another way of saying this is that every socio-cultural milieu is a textual milieu, where ‘text’ (from the Latin root) implies a ‘weaving’ of language into patterned compositions, whether spoken or scripted or both (Stock 1990). Every milieu has its meaningful, inscribed narratives.

It is in this sense, too, that one can understand Bruner and Weisser’s claim (1991:133) that: ‘“lives” are texts: texts that are subject to revision, exegesis, reinterpretation, and so on’. For, one comes to know one’s life through ‘never-ending textualization’, through the formulation and reformulation of a conceptual and narrative account of what that life is about.The individual constitutes himself for himself (and as a self) in an ongoing story; carried in memory, such textualization represents the primary process of ‘self-accounting’.

The textual account of self might be verbalized (voiced or unvoiced) or it might be otherwise imagined, it might be enunciated as shorter or longer versions of itself, it might be to some extent unified, but it is always evolving and always referred to, whether implicitly or explicitly. Cognitive writing, in short, is a constant process. As Bruner and Weisser sum up (1991:136): ‘The process of life-textualization is…a neverending interpretation and reinterpretation. Its textual status is not in the strict sense determined exclusively by acts of speaking and writing, but depends instead upon acts of conceptualization.’

Writing and coherency

By writing a text, Augustine argued (1907), one is able to hold together the fragments of consciousness and hence make meaning and some kind of order in one’s life. In a sense, he felt, such autobiography is fictional since one is attempting the impossible: to know oneself from amid one’s life and story as if from without; to see as whole and complete—as

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